I’ve been ‘inhabiting’ mastodon.social since about the beginning. I’ve often been frustrated by the limitations imposed by 500 characters of text.
It’s just not enough to really express a literate view without splitting up a post among several posts.
Clearly, there are ways to circumvent the limitation, which illuminates it as a futile attempt to control the expression of others.
I know that was never the intention of Mastodon developers. I will reserve judgement as concerns Twitter.
Anyway, since the beginning of the ‘great exodus’ of mastodon.social users to their own community instances, I’ve been trying to sort out where I ‘belong’.
Well, actually it just might be here :)
I really don’t think that there’s anything wrong with mastodons character limit.
Hmmmm, whatever floats your boat. I find it highly constraining, but I do like to go on. No doubt the result of a couple years of instruction in collegiate level English composition.
Also, it’s more a platform limitation (masto tries to go head to head with twitter) than anything,
In any case, the source of my actual butthurt with mastodon today is this thing they’re doing with the android beta. Where you have to be subscribed to their patreon to get it. Honestly, I dgaf about getting the android client; I hate my phone and it’s because of the handcuffed, bastardized linux it runs. However I am deeply committed to FOSS, having developed, tested and in fact made a living with it for decades. My beef isn’t that I think everything is supposed to be free, it’s that I think anything advertised as FOSS damn well better be free or they can anticipate hearing from those pf us who take Free and Open damned seriously. There are a million ways they can directly support themselves in developing mastodon without practically taking a segment of their user base hostage for the FOSS code.
That Is Not The Way.
Then i suggest you open an issue on github, you might find out that funding FOSS for a social media platform is not as easy as you think it is (especially if you don’t want to sacrifice some income by giving up on good paying jobs).
Are you not mistaken here? Does FOSS not mean “free as in free speech, not as in free beer”? I.e. it does not necessarily mean offering the software to you for zero cost, it means that once you have acquired it (whether you paid for it or it was given away) you can do with it what you wish